The newsletter of UCL Medical School: highlighting achievements by staff and students; communicating developments in the Undergraduate and Postgraduate activities of the Medical School; and sharing good practice between medical educators.

Do you ever wonder what all the staff in UCL Medical School do? Now you can find out with our new feature ‘a week in the to-do list of….’ If you would like to be featured please contact Deanne Attreed.

With the spring and summer open days behind us, September, and induction week in particular, marks a transition between application cycles and the start of the busiest part of the year in Admissions. On a sunny Monday in September the new first year students arrived at UCL, keen to enrol and get started on their programmes. New medical students come from across the UK, Europe and the rest of the world. Many different countries are represented, from Switzerland, Italy and Luxembourg, to South Korea, Mauritius and India, creating a diverse student body.

The new first years are the chosen few hundred out of thousands of 2012 applicants! We see most of them one last time to complete their CRB checks, before they head off on their academic adventure and we turn our minds to the next cycle.

During the 2012 cycle we were very pleased to participate in a scheme being piloted by UCL’s Undergraduate Admissions Manager to increase the number of students admitted from widening participation backgrounds. The pilot involved using contextual data to identify students from disadvantaged backgrounds and to track these students through the selection process. Given a target of ten offers, we were pleased to be able to make fifteen offers, then ultimately to admit eleven students identified as being within this group. The pilot should contribute to UCL’s continuing effort to increase the proportion of students taken from lower socio-economic groups and low participation neighbourhoods, as required by our Access Agreement. The next challenging step in meeting the Access Agreement’s targets is for UCL to increase the proportion of students admitted from state schools.

Every year there is a new challenge in Admissions. This year we will be making final preparations for the switch to an entirely paperless application process. A new electronic workflow will be introduced in one year’s time, but we have been moving steadily towards paper-light processes for the last few years. In addition we will continue to participate in other undergraduate admissions reviews, driven by UCL Registry.

To coincide with the arrival of the class of 2012, we started to receive applications for 2013 and 2014! In Admissions we usually work at least one year ahead. We anticipate reading 2500 applications between September and the end of November, so expect to see us blinking if you pass us in the corridor!